English

Multiple-Goal Heuristic Search

Artificial Intelligence 2015-03-19 v1

Abstract

This paper presents a new framework for anytime heuristic search where the task is to achieve as many goals as possible within the allocated resources. We show the inadequacy of traditional distance-estimation heuristics for tasks of this type and present alternative heuristics that are more appropriate for multiple-goal search. In particular, we introduce the marginal-utility heuristic, which estimates the cost and the benefit of exploring a subtree below a search node. We developed two methods for online learning of the marginal-utility heuristic. One is based on local similarity of the partial marginal utility of sibling nodes, and the other generalizes marginal-utility over the state feature space. We apply our adaptive and non-adaptive multiple-goal search algorithms to several problems, including focused crawling, and show their superiority over existing methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.6618,
  title  = {Multiple-Goal Heuristic Search},
  author = {D. Davidov and S. Markovitch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.6618},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:12:46.550Z